Today, there exist various examples of short-range radio technologies. Where short-range radio is deployed, it is often used in conjunction with multi-hop networking in a mesh configuration. Mesh networks may interconnect wirelessly and/or be wired between communication devices to form a cooperative communication infrastructure. Each device in the mesh network operates as a node for routing communication signals. As a result, communication signals originating from one device, hop from node to node within the mesh network to arrive at the target device or to a mobile communication network. Mowing the packages to make multiple hops to reach the desired device or the internet improves the coverage area of short-range radio solutions, even without any public network base stations. Protocols such as the Routing Protocol for Low power and lossy networks, RPL, Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector, AODV, Routing and Dynamic MANET On-demand, DYMO, routing protocol are used to implement the multi-hop routing mechanisms.
However, currently there is almost no public short-range radio connectivity in mobile communications networks. It has been developed but is not that widely deployed, since it provides no profit to the supplier, because the charging issue is not solved. It is still necessary to deploy some number of short-range base stations for connectivity to the rest of the Internet, and this is economically difficult to justify merely for short range radio connectivity. This is particularly true as revenues from a short-range radio service would necessarily be small in the beginning before large numbers of devices start to take benefit from the new connectivity.
Furthermore, Machine to machine, M2M, communication over mobile and wireless networks is expected to become increasingly important in the future. Examples of possible M2M applications are almost countless e.g. in private cars for communicating service needs, in water or electricity meters for remote control and/or remote meter reading, in street-side vending machines for communicating when goods are out-of-stock or when enough coins are present to justify a visit for emptying, in taxi cars for validating credit cards, in surveillance cameras for home or corporate security purposes etc.
The increase in M2M devices will increase the demand for capacity in the mobile communication networks. However, a problem today is that the mesh networks may not always have enough routers to cover a wide area, or to reach all the M2M devices. It also becomes difficult in a network of many M2M devices to manage the set of devices that belong to a particular user. The devices for different users may all be mixed in the same local area network. In addition, if a user has devices in different places, they are not easily addressed at the same time.
If a user sets up a mobile device as a hot spot for connecting M2M machines in the vicinity to the Internet it will seem, from the mobile networks point of view that all data is sent from and received at the mobile device.
In summary, short-range radio technology is developed but is not widely used. There are problems with the current solutions in that there is almost no public short-range connectivity, it is very difficult to manage the devices that belongs to a particular user in a large network, it is difficult to manage devices of the same user that are located in different networks and when a device is used as the hot spot for the other devices to connect to the mobile communication network, the other devices are invisible to the network. Furthermore, there is no charging structure making short range technology profitable for the operators.